


Soto! Explore thyself!

by middlemarch



Category: Little Women Series - Louisa May Alcott
Genre: Conversations, Gen, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Sisters, Writing, probably late Good Wives early Little Men vintage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-05
Updated: 2019-01-05
Packaged: 2019-10-04 19:44:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 735
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17310689
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: The sisters meet for an afternoon of sewing. Conversation ensues-- and reflection.





	Soto! Explore thyself!

“What if, this whole time, Marmee has been unhappy?” Jo asked. She was knitting, because she could do that without attending to it very much. Meg was darning a pair of Demi’s socks and Amy was embroidering a collar for Bess in whitework. It was very elegant and she looked very elegant doing it, her wide skirts a cream-colored silk Jo would have stained in an instant. 

“What do you mean, Jo?” Meg said, pursing her lips. The heels never became that much easier to turn and Demi wouldn’t complain if there were lumps but he might get a blister. 

“I mean, we all had dreams, our castles in the sky—of writing and painting, the theater. We never quite got them, but we got closer than most. What did Marmee want, when she was a girl, before Father—we’ve never even asked!” Jo exclaimed in her old way, her neatly netted chignon and apron unable to mask her vital, intrepid spirit, her exuberant confrontation of anything that troubled her. 

“How could we? She is our mother, not our friend,” Amy said sedately. She did not like to be reminded of Vevey before Laurie came, how the instructor had said No soul, no spark when he appraised her work. How her sculpture had improved after she’d lost the first two babies and Bess had nearly gone the first winter of her life, except that Amy had held her and Laurie held Amy.

“You think we should,” Meg said, counting stitches.

“I think we might. I think she’d tell the truth,” Jo said.

“She would—but would we want to hear it? If she has been unhappy or disconsolate,” Amy said, seeing Bess’s pale cheeks, the blank canvas, the white fields that led to the folly Laurie had built for her after the first baby had been too early to take a breath.

“Or enraged,” Jo said, remembering a fire stoked with her own words and the time it took to run for help, ice under foot. Of her mother’s face in the candlelight, her dark eyes the same shape as Meg’s, prettier than Amy.

“Will asking her help her—or us, Jo? Are we relieving her of a burden or giving her one?” Meg asked. She thought of John, crying in the night for the men he’d lost in the War, the tears on his face, the salt on her lips. Sometimes silence wasn’t an absence of words but a presence of abiding peace in the face of distress. Of a shadow that resolved into a companion soul and not a wraith.

“That’s the question worth answering, isn’t it? By Jove, Meg, you are a genius,” Jo declared. Friedrich would help her parse it, his nightshirt soft under her cheek. His hands would be warm on her shoulders, clever now undoing her night-plaits.

“Oh, Jo! You don’t change!” Meg said.

“How could I? I am myself, from root to flower. Aren’t you?” Jo replied. Amy shook her head, her blonde curls arranged artfully, the pearls at her ears swinging gently.

“Not all of us have your certainty, Jo,” Amy said.

“You should,” Jo said stoutly. She suspected Marmee would not have answered thus.

“We’re made differently. Doubt is not always a deficit,” Meg said.

“And change is not always a dissolution,” Amy added.

“Some mysteries mayn’t be solved, I suppose. They don’t all come out neat the way my blood-and-thunder stories did,” Jo mused. The idea struck her, to ask her mother indirectly, through a story that was just now taking form within Jo’s mind, coalescing like a cloud did into a stallion or a dragon. If she wrote it subtly enough, her mother’s response would tell her everything.

“I do miss those. The damsels were never in very much distress,” Meg said, setting down the second sock.

“You made sure she could wield a sword or leap from the bridge to a roiling sea below,” Amy said. “I always liked that, that she could choose to wait for the knight, but she needn’t.”

“P’rhaps I’ll write another. For an afternoon like this. Meg can be the Duchess of Ilvermorny and Amy, you can be Lord Eagleswith in disguise as her lady-in-waiting, ready to escape to a hidden cove when the pirates come,” Jo said.

“Pirates?” Meg repeated.

“Of course, Meg dear. There are always pirates,” Jo said contentedly. “Why else would anyone bother writing?”

**Author's Note:**

> If you keep reading Little Women over the course of your life, you start thinking about it in lots of different ways, especially once you become a mother and have daughters. 
> 
> The title is from Emily Dickinson.


End file.
